​The company BackRub was established in 1996 as a cutting edge search engine. BackRub checked the number of back-links to a website in order to rank its importance. However, with such a strange name and a rather horrible looking logo the company didn’t last long. What happened? The founders of BackRub changed the name to Google, and the rest is history.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, in California and it was originally run under Stanford University’s website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.

I am going to share the Google Manifesto with you in this blog but before I do so, let me introduce another search engine that I have just started using. It is called Ecosia and when you search the web with this browser, 80% of the profits from the search ad revenue goes to support tree planting programs. Nearly 22 million trees are planted so far and these trees help restore landscapes, nourish communities, protect wildlife and neutralize CO2. Here’s a link to it: https://www.ecosia.org

Now, some of you might be frigtened by Google at this stage, the way they are “taking over the world”. But as entrepreneuring goes, I am in awe of them, hence sharing their manifesto on my blog:

Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does - and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people.

3. Fast is better than slow.We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away - and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible.

4. Democracy on the web works.Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone.

6. You can make money without doing evil.Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content.

7. There’s always more information out there.Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible.

9. You can be serious without a suit.Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture - and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

Both Larry and Sergey have found their ‘why’ by “developing services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.”

Christian Kroll from Germany, the founder of the search engine that plants trees, Ecosia, has found his ‘why’ too and although I don’t love the look of the brand identity(!) I wish him and his team all the very best. ​Trees are vital for our planet. Here’s the link again in case you’d like to give it a try: https://www.ecosia.org

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